Like most cities in the United States, Boston can lay claim to a punk-era history all its own. The venerable Boston Groupie News, the Subway News, and later,Forced Exposure are among the better-known chronicles of such indigenous noise and youthful exuberance that flourished along the banks of the Charles River between the mid 1970s and the late 80s. Now we can add Miscarriage to the list of essential Boston underground fanzines.

Artists’ postcards from the collection of Ulises Carrión, comprised of approximately 900 individual items in 108 small edition sets (most 50-500 copies) by Günter Brus, Stempelplaats, Nickolaus Urban, and Gabor Toth, among others, many signed by the artists and addressed to Carrión. [44030]

Brus, Gunter "O Wunder, Wunderschone Sonne," suite of four postcard prints, N.p., 1978. Signed and dated by Brus with dedication to Carrión on verso of first card.

Without so much as an envelope to keep their contents private, postcards may be our most casual yet intimate mode of personal correspondence. We send them to our friends and colleagues to boast of our visits to exotic locales, natural wonders and art museums. The gesture implies fondness and familiarity with the addressee—“wish you were here,” etc. And though they sometimes depictworks of art, we seldom think of them as substantial works of art unto themselves.

The global tidal wave of youth culture rebellion and experimentation of the late 1960s and early 1970s did not bypass Tokyo. Shinjuku ward—home to the city’s municipal government and its busiest commuter rail center—was the local substation through which powerful new currents in music, fashion and visual art flowed in and out of Japan.

A pronounced regionalism prevailed in the American underground music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In California, the micro-climates of Los Angeles and San Francisco each nurtured a distinctive local take on punk rock. Local fanzines reflected this, with publications like Search & Destroy celebrating the eclecticism of the Bay Area while Slash Magazine spoke to the angular defiance of Melrose and Silverlake. Brad Lapin’s Damage: An Inventory represented itself as a partisan of both communities, and furthermore, sought to connect West Coast punk to developments in Tokyo, Paris, London and elsewhere.

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